Jim Syler

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From Bash to Z Sh...
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"Turns out I don’t need this book right now after all; I finally found a-Shell’s documentation (and it uses dash, not bash!). So perhaps I’ll read this at some point, but I’m done for now." Nov 06, 2023 06:02AM

 
Origins: How Eart...
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GURPS Adaptations
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Marie Curie
“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.”
Marie Curie

Alan             Moore
“People shouldn't be afraid of their government. Governments should be afraid of their people.”
Alan Moore, V for Vendetta

Oscar Wilde
“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”
Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

Robert A. Heinlein
“What are the facts? Again and again and again – what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what “the stars foretell,” avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable “verdict of history” – what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!”
Robert Heinlein

Robert A. Heinlein
“The America of my time line is a laboratory example of what can happen to democracies, what has eventually happened to all perfect democracies throughout all histories. A perfect democracy, a ‘warm body’ democracy in which every adult may vote and all votes count equally, has no internal feedback for self-correction. It depends solely on the wisdom and self-restraint of citizens… which is opposed by the folly and lack of self-restraint of other citizens. What is supposed to happen in a democracy is that each sovereign citizen will always vote in the public interest for the safety and welfare of all. But what does happen is that he votes his own self-interest as he sees it… which for the majority translates as ‘Bread and Circuses.’

‘Bread and Circuses’ is the cancer of democracy, the fatal disease for which there is no cure. Democracy often works beautifully at first. But once a state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, that day marks the beginning of the end of the state. For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader—the barbarians enter Rome.”
Robert A. Heinlein

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